Leaden Conversation Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

As if the whole world is on my back
A thousand elephants I carry
On shoulders the heaviness of centuries
Taught and learned as morality
Religion of the man who with perfumes
Nauseating and thick books of metal paper
Speaks before some object so his message
Reaches thousand ears spreading hatred

I burned the books of the yore leaden too
With thoughts of further thousand years
The “ornament of paradise” or giving
Instructions how I undertake my private chores
Told with perverse pleasure of that sick man
Who says he has embraced modernity now
And talked of lesbians when not needed

In the culture when young children talk
With the heaviness of a suffocating bull
Under the great load to cultivate land
For the future with seeds coming from the hands
That man who knows he will die soon
His son grows to be old at the age of ten
Who walks on earth as if his feet dig
Ten feet down the earth for his leaden thought

On his visit to the holy places he is cleansed
Of all sins and becomes an addition
Into the leaden baggage of the society
The young and those beautiful girls
Carry him as the biggest curse on earth

He marries a young girl of fourteen
His moustache he oils with the fat of lamb
The night before he had been eating
Raw testes of the bull as aphrodisiac

He talks of politics and his son and his son’s son
Carry the leaden curse of the centuries
In their leaden conversation in sly gatherings
8/12/2008